The Principal Investigator will undertake research under this Presidential Young Investigator award directed at improving understanding of the general circulation of the ocean. This research will focus on the role of instabilities in ocean currents and their impact on production of mesoscale eddies in the ocean. The approach will be based on numerical calculations to extend stability analysis to strongly non-linear regimes. The immediate objective is to understand the effect of radiation from an initially localized source on evolution of flow to a statistically steady, non-linear state.
